The point, Wehrmeyer says, is to make it easy for German voters to track changes to the laws – and to also give lawmakers a vision of the future. Right now, Germany posts its laws and regulations on the web – and makes these files available for download in XML format – but it's a bit of a tricky business to keep track of what's different.

GitHub solves that problem. Wehrmeyer's plan is to periodically download the complete German legal code and then use Git and some custom tools to convert it into a simple format and figure out what's changed. He then submits those changes to his existing set of laws as a pull request.

GitHub is a version-control system that also doubles as a kind of social network for geeks. It lets coders swap and discuss code over the web, but it's also gaining traction as a system for keeping track of changes to all sorts of things: from books to design projects to magazine articles. The company just took $100 million in funding from venture capital firm Andreessen-Horowitz, and, clearly, it wants to use that money to push the website into new directions.

Wehrmeyer's system may sound cumbersome, but it has some powerful benefits. It lets anyone see how German laws have been modified over time. That's data that would be useful to researchers or activists who want a clear picture of how laws have changed. Wehrmeyer is also using the system to submit proposed laws as well.

He's done his project without any contact or support from the Bundestag, but he hopes they're watching. His experiment shows how the government could be more transparent about how the legal code is changing. "My ultimate goal was to have version-control laws," he says.*Image: Konstantin Käfer*